Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘But you’ve kept in touch.’
Maybe he could make up some story about why he still saw Robert, a story that might cast him in a
more flattering light, make him seem a little more complicated.
‘Yeah. Dunno why, really.’ No story, then, obviously. Oh well. The truth was that he didn’t know why
they’d kept in touch. They got on reasonably well, but Robert had got on reasonably well with most of
that crowd, and Will had never been entirely sure why he had been the one who survived the inevitable
career-change cull. Maybe—and this sounded paranoid, but he was sure there was a grain of truth in
here somewhere—he was enough of a deadbeat to demonstrate to the people here that Robert had pre-
media roots, while at the same time he was presentable enough not to scare them all away.
He’d lost Rachel, for now at least. She was talking to the person sitting on her other side. What could
he reel her back with? He must have had some talent or other which he could exaggerate and dramatize
somehow. Cooking? He could cook a bit, but who couldn’t? Maybe he was writing a novel and had
forgotten about it. What had he been good at when he was at school? Spelling. ‘Hey, Rachel, how many
c’s in necessary?’ She probably knew anyway. It was hopeless. The most interesting thing about his life,
he realized, was Marcus. That was something which set him apart. ‘Sorry to butt in, Rachel, but I have
this weird relationship with a twelve-year-old boy. Is that any good to you?’ OK, the material needed
some work, but it was there, definitely. It just needed shaping. He vowed to bring up Marcus at the first
available opportunity.
Rachel had noticed he wasn’t talking to anyone, and wheeled round so that he could be included in a
conversation about whether there was anything new under the sun, with particular reference to
contemporary popular music. Rachel said that to her Nirvana sounded just like Led Zeppelin.
‘I know a twelve-year-old who’d kill you for saying that,’ said Will. It wasn’t true, of course. A couple
of weeks ago, Marcus had thought that the lead singer of Nirvana played for Manchester United, so he
was probably not yet at the stage where he wanted to annihilate people who accused the band of being
derivative.
‘So do I, come to that,’ said Rachel. ‘Maybe they should meet. What’s yours called?’
He’s not mine, exactly, he thought. ‘Marcus,’ he said.
‘Mine’s Ali. Alistair.’
‘Right.’
‘And is Marcus into skateboards and rap and
The Simpsons
and so on?’
Will raised his eyes skywards and chuckled fondly, and the misapprehension was cast in concrete. It
wasn’t his fault, this conversation. He hadn’t lied once in the entire minute and a half. OK, he had been
speaking more figuratively than the expression usually implied when he had said that Marcus would kill
her. And OK, the rolling eyes and the fond chuckle did suggest a certain amount of parental indulgence.
But he hadn’t actually said that Marcus was his son. That was one hundred per cent her interpretation.
Certainly over fifty per cent, anyway. But it definitely wasn’t the SPAT thing, when he’d lied through
his teeth for the entire duration of the evening.
‘And is Marcus’s mother here tonight?’
‘Ummm…’ Will looked up and down the dinner table as if to remind himself one way or the other.
‘No.’ Not a lie! Not a lie! Marcus’s mother was not there!
‘You’re not spending New Year’s Eve with her?’ Rachel was narrowing her eyes and looking down
her nose to indicate that she knew this was a leading question.
‘No. We, er, we don’t live together.’ He’d really got the hang of this truth-telling business now, he
felt. If anything, he’d moved right away from lying and towards understatement, because not only was
he not living with Fiona at the moment, but he had never lived with her, and never intended to live with
her in the future.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK. How about Ali’s dad?’
‘Not at this table. Not in this city. Not in this country. He gives me his phone number when he moves.’
‘Right.’
Will had at least managed to introduce some friction into the conversation. Until he’d played the
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Marcus card he’d kept slipping off before he’d even started. Now he felt as though he were climbing a
mountain, rather than a glacier. He imagined himself right at the bottom of the cliff-face, looking up and
around for footholds.
‘Which country is he in, then?’
‘The States. California. I’d prefer Australia, but there you are. At least it’s the west coast.’
Will reckoned he’d now heard fifty-seven varieties of this conversation, but this gave him an
advantage: he knew how it went, and go it did. He might not have done anything in the last decade and a
half, but he could cluck sympathetically when a woman told him how badly her ex-husband had
behaved. Clucking was something he had got really good at. But it worked, as clucking often did—no
one, he decided, ever did themselves any harm by listening attentively to other people’s woes. Rachel’s
story was, by SPAT standards, run-of-the-mill, and it turned out that she hated her ex because of who he
was, rather than what he had done to her.
‘So why the fuck did you have a child with him?’ He was drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. He was
feeling cheeky.
She laughed. ‘Good question. No answer. You change your mind about people. What’s Marcus’s
mother’s name?’
‘Fiona.’ Which, of course, it was.
‘Did you change your mind about her?’
‘Not really.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I dunno.’ He shrugged, and somehow managed to give a rather convincing impression of a man who
was still baffled, shell-shocked even. The words and the gesture were born of desperation; it was ironic,
then, that they somehow managed to make a connection.
Rachel smiled, and picked up the knife she hadn’t used, and examined it. ‘In the end, "I dunno" is the
only honest answer anyone can give, isn’t it? Because I dunno either, and I’d be kidding myself, and
you, if I pretended any different.’
At midnight they sought each other out and kissed, a kiss that was somewhere between cheek and lip,
the embarrassed ambiguity hopefully significant. And at half-past midnight, just before Rachel left, they
arranged to get their lads together to compare skateboards and baseball caps and the Christmas edition of
The Simpsons
.
Twenty-Five
Ellie was at Suzie’s New Year’s Eve party. For a moment, Marcus thought it was just someone who
looked like Ellie, and wore the same Kurt Cobain sweatshirt as Ellie, but then the Ellie lookalike saw
him and shouted ‘Marcus!’ and came over and hugged him and kissed him on the head, which kind of
cleared up the confusion.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked her.
‘We always come here on New Year’s Eve,’ she said. ‘My mum’s really good friends with Suzie.’
‘I’ve never seen you here.’
‘You’ve never been here on New Year’s Eve, you twit.’
It was true. He’d been to Suzie’s flat loads of times, but he’d never come to the parties. This was the
first year he’d been allowed to go. Why was it that even in the simplest, most straightforward
conversations with Ellie he found something stupid to say?
‘Which one’s your mum?’
‘Don’t ask,’ said Ellie. ‘Not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s dancing.’
Marcus looked over at the very small group dancing in the corner where the TV usually was. There
were four people, three women and a man, and only one of them seemed to be having a good time: she
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was sort of punching the air with her fists and shaking her hair. Marcus guessed that this had to be
Ellie’s mum—not because she looked like her (no adult looked like Ellie, because no adult would chop
her hair up with kitchen scissors and wear black lipstick, and that was all you saw), but because Ellie
was clearly embarrassed, and this was the only dancer who would embarrass anyone. The other dancers
were embarrassed themselves, which meant that they weren’t actually embarrassing; they weren’t doing
much more than tapping their feet, and the only way you could tell they were dancing at all was that
they were facing each other but not looking at each other and not talking.
‘I wish I could dance like that,’ said Marcus.
Ellie made a face. ‘Anyone can dance like that. All you need is no brain and crap music.’
‘I think she looks great. She’s enjoying herself.’
‘Who cares whether she’s enjoying herself? The point is she looks like a total cretin.’
‘Don’t you like your mum, then?’
‘She’s all right.’
‘What about your dad?’
‘He’s all right. They don’t live together.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No. Sometimes. Don’t want to talk about it. So, Marcus, have you had a good nineteen ninety-three?’
Marcus thought for a moment about 1993, and a moment was all it took to decide that 1993 hadn’t
been a very good year at all. He only had ten or eleven others to compare it with, and three or four of
them he couldn’t remember much about, but as far as he could see nobody would have enjoyed the
twelve months he’d had. Moving schools, the hospital stuff, the other kids at school… It had been
totally useless.
‘No.’
‘You need a drink,’ said Ellie. ‘What do you want? I’ll get you a drink and you can tell me all about it.
I might get bored and wander off, though. I do that.’
‘OK.’
‘So, what are you drinking?’
‘Coke.’
‘You’ve got to have a proper drink.’
‘I’m not allowed.’
‘You’re allowed by me. In fact, if you’re going to be my date for the evening, I insist that you have a
proper drink. I’ll put something in the Coke, OK?’
‘OK.’
Ellie disappeared, and Marcus looked round for his mum: she was talking to a man he didn’t know and
laughing a lot. He was pleased, because he had been worried about tonight. Will had told him to watch
out for his mum on New Year’s Eve, and though he didn’t explain why, Marcus could guess: a lot of
people who weren’t happy killed themselves then. He had seen it somewhere,
Casualty
, maybe, and as a
consequence the night had been hanging over him. He thought he’d be watching her all evening, looking
for something in her eyes or her voice or her words that would tell him she was thinking about trying it
again, but it wasn’t like that: she was getting drunk and laughing, like everyone else. Had anyone ever
killed themselves a couple of hours after laughing a lot? Probably not, he reckoned. You were miles
away, if you were laughing, and he did now think of it all in terms of distance. Ever since the Dead
Duck Day he had imagined his mother’s suicide to be something like the edge of a cliff: sometimes, on
days when she seemed sad or distracted, he felt as though they were a little too close for comfort, and
other days, like Christmas Day or today, they seemed to be a long way away, in the middle lane of a
motorway and cruising. On the Dead Duck Day it had been way too close, two wheels over the edge and
lots of terrible skidding noises.
Ellie came back with a plastic beaker containing something which looked like Coke but smelt like
trifle.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Sherry.’
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‘Is that what people drink? Coke and sherry?’ He took a cautious sip. It was nice, sweet and thick and
warming.
‘So why has it been such a shit year?’ Ellie asked. ‘You can tell me. Auntie Ellie will understand.’
‘Just… I dunno. Horrible things happened.’ He didn’t really want to tell Ellie what they were, because
he didn’t know whether they were friends or not. It could go either way with her: he might go into her
form room one morning and she’d shout it all out to anyone who would listen, or she might be really
nice. It wasn’t worth taking the risk.
‘Your mum tried to kill herself, didn’t she?’
Marcus looked at her, took a big gulp of Coke and trifle, and was nearly sick all over her feet.
‘No,’ he said quickly, when he had finished coughing and swallowed the sick back down.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Not positive.’ He knew how stupid that sounded and he started to blush, but then Ellie
burst into peals of laughter. He had forgotten that he made Ellie laugh so much and he was grateful.
‘I’m sorry, Marcus. I know it’s serious, but you are funny.’
He started to laugh too, then, little uncontrollable giggles that tasted of puke and sherry.
Marcus had never had a proper talk with someone of his own age before. He had had proper talks with
his mum, of course, and his dad, and Will, kind of, but you expected to have proper talks with people
like that and, anyway, you still had to watch what you said. It was different, much easier, with Ellie,
even though she was a) a girl, b) older than him, and c) scary.
It turned out she’d known for ages: she’d overheard a conversation between her mum and Suzie just
after it happened, but didn’t make the connection until much later.
‘And do you know what I thought? I feel terrible about it now, but I was like, why shouldn’t she kill
herself if she wants to?’
‘But she’s got me.’
‘I didn’t know you then.’
‘No, but I mean, how would you like it if your mum killed herself?’
Ellie smiled. ‘How would I like it? I wouldn’t like it. Because I like my mum. But, you know. It’s her
life.’
Marcus thought about that. He didn’t know whether it was his mum’s life or not.
‘What about if you have kids? Then it’s not your life any more, is it?’
‘Your dad’s around, isn’t he? He would’ve looked after you.’
‘Yeah, but…’ Something wasn’t right with what Ellie was saying. She was talking as if his mum
might go down with flu, so his dad would have to take him swimming.
‘See, if your dad killed himself, nobody would say, you know, oh, he’s got a son to look after. But
when women do it, people get all upset. It’s not fair.’
‘That’s because I’m living with my mum. If I was living with my dad, I’d think it wasn’t his life
either.’
‘But you aren’t living with your dad, are you? How many of us are? At our school, there’s about a
million kids whose parents have split. And none of them are living with their dads.’
‘Stephen Wood is.’
‘Yeah, right, Stephen Wood. You win.’
Even though what they were talking about was miserable, Marcus was enjoying the conversation. It
seemed big, as though you could walk round it and see different things, and that never happened when
you talked to kids normally. ‘Did you see
Top of the Pops
last night?’ There wasn’t much to think about
in that, was there? You said yes or no and it was over. He could see now why his mum
chose
friends,
instead of just putting up with anyone she happened to bump into, or sticking with people who
supported the same football team, or wore the same clothes, which was pretty much what happened at
school; his mum must have conversations like this with Suzie, conversations which moved,
conversations where each thing the other person said seemed to lead you on somewhere.
He wanted to keep it going but he didn’t know how, because Ellie was the one who said the things that
got them started. He was OK at coming up with the answers, he reckoned, but he doubted if he’d ever be
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clever enough to make Ellie think in the way she made him think, and that panicked him a little: he
wished they were equally clever, but they weren’t, and they probably never would be, because Ellie
would always be older than him. Maybe when he was thirty-two and she was thirty-five it wouldn’t
matter so much, but it felt to him that unless he said something really smart in the next few minutes,
then she wouldn’t hang around for the rest of the evening, let alone for the next twenty years. Suddenly
he remembered the thing boys were supposed to ask girls at parties. He didn’t want to ask, because he
knew he was hopeless at it, but the alternative—to let Ellie wander away and talk to somebody else—
was just too horrible.
‘Would you like to dance, Ellie?’
Ellie stared at him, her eyes wide with surprise.
‘Marcus!’ She started laughing again, really hard. ‘You’re so funny. Of course I wouldn’t like to
dance! I couldn’t think of anything worse!’
He knew then that he should have thought of another proper question, something about Kurt Cobain or
politics, because Ellie disappeared off somewhere for a smoke, and he had to go and find his mum. But
Ellie came looking for him at midnight and gave him a hug, so he knew that even though he’d been
stupid, he hadn’t been unforgivably stupid.
‘Happy New Year, darling,’ she said, and he blushed.
‘Thank you. Happy New Year to you.’
‘And I hope nineteen ninety-four is better for all of us than nineteen ninety-three was. Hey, do you
want to see something really disgusting?’
Marcus wasn’t at all sure that he did, but he was given no choice in the matter. Ellie grabbed his arm
and took him through the back door to the garden. He tried to ask her where they were going, but she
shushed him.
‘Look,’ she whispered. Marcus peered into the darkness. He could just make out two human shapes
kissing with frantic energy; the man was pressing the woman against the garden shed and his hands were
all over her.
‘Who is it?’ Marcus asked Ellie.
‘My mum. My mum and a guy called Tim Porter. She’s drunk. They do this every year, and I don’t
know why they bother. Every New Year’s Day she wakes up and says, "My God, I think I went outside
with Tim Porter last night." Pathetic. PATHETIC!’ She shouted out the last word so that she’d be heard,
and Marcus saw Ellie’s mum push the man away and look in their direction.
‘Ellie? Is that you?’
‘You said you weren’t going to do that this year.’
‘It’s none of your business what I do. Go back inside.’
‘No.’
‘Do as you’re told.’
‘No. You’re disgusting. Forty-three years old and you’re snogging against a garden shed.’
‘One night of the year I get to behave nearly as badly as you do on the other three hundred and sixty-
four, and you stand there giving me a hard time. Go away.’
‘Come on, Marcus. Let’s leave the SAD OLD TART to get on with it.’
Marcus followed Ellie back into the house. He hadn’t seen his mum do anything like that, and he
couldn’t imagine that she ever would, but he could see how it might happen to other people’s mums.
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ he asked Ellie when they were inside.
‘Nah. It doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s just her having some fun. She doesn’t get much, really.’
Even though it didn’t seem to bother Ellie, it bothered Marcus. It was just too odd for words. It
wouldn’t have happened in Cambridge, he didn’t think, but what he couldn’t work out was whether
Cambridge was different because it wasn’t London, or because it was where his parents had lived
together, and where, therefore, life was simpler—no snogging with strange people in front of your kid,
and no yelling rude words at your mum. There were no rules here, and he was old enough to know that
when you went to a place, or a time, with no rules then things were bound to be more complicated.
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