Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
It wasn’t turning out as badly as Will feared it might. She was definitely seeing some kind of funny
side, even though she clearly thought he was a weirdo.
‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Could have happened to anyone.’
‘Hey, don’t push your luck. If I want to be amused and tolerant, that’s my business. I’m not yet at a
stage where you can make jokes too.’
‘Sorry.’
‘But where does Marcus come in? I mean, you obviously hadn’t hired him for the afternoon. There’s
some kind of relationship there.’
She was right, of course, and he rescued a potentially disastrous evening by telling her everything
there was to tell. Nearly everything, anyway: he didn’t tell her the reason he had come across Marcus in
the first place was because he had joined SPAT. He didn’t tell her that because he thought it might
sound bad coming on top of a similar revelation. He didn’t want her to think he had a problem.
Rachel invited him back for coffee after the meal, but Will knew that sex wasn’t in the air. Or rather,
there was a little, the merest whiff, but it was emanating from him, so it didn’t count. He found Rachel
so attractive that there would always be sex in the air when he was with her. All that seemed to be
coming from her was a quiet amusement and a sort of baffled tolerance, and though he was grateful for
these small mercies, they were very rarely, he would imagine, precursors to any kind of physical
intimacy beyond a quick hair-ruffle.
Rachel made coffee in great big blue designer cups and they sat opposite each other, Rachel spread out
on the sofa, Will bolt upright in an old armchair covered with some kind of Asian throw.
‘Why did you think Marcus would make you more interesting?’ she asked him after they had poured
and stirred and blown and done everything else they could think of doing to a cup of coffee.
‘Was I more interesting?’
‘Yes, I suppose you were.’
‘Why?’
‘Because… You really want to know the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because I thought you were a sort of blank—you didn’t do anything, you weren’t passionate about
anything, you didn’t seem to have much to say—and then when you said you had a kid—’
‘I didn’t actually say—’
‘Yeah, whatever… I thought, I’ve got this guy all wrong.’
‘So there you are then. You’ve answered your own question.’
‘But I
had
got you wrong.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘Because there is something there. You didn’t make it all up about Marcus. You’re involved, and you
care, and you understand him, and you worry about him… So you’re not the guy I thought you were
before you brought him up.’
Will knew this was supposed to make him feel better about everything, but it didn’t. For a start, he’d
only known Marcus for a few months, so Rachel had raised some interesting questions about the thirty-
six years he had let slip through his fingers. And he didn’t want to be defined by Marcus. He wanted his
own life, and his own identity; he wanted to be interesting in his own right. Where had he heard that
complaint before? At SPAT, that’s where. He had somehow managed to turn himself into a single parent
without even going to the trouble of fathering a child.
There was hardly any point in moaning though. It was too late for that; he had chosen to ignore his
own advice, advice that had served him well for his entire adult life. The way Will saw it, the reason that
some of the people at SPAT were in a state wasn’t because they had kids—their problems had started
earlier than that, when they first fell for someone and made themselves vulnerable. Now Will had done
the same and, as far as he was concerned, he deserved all he got. He’d be singing with his eyes closed
soon, and there was nothing he could do about it.
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Twenty-Nine
For three or four weeks—it couldn’t have been any longer than that, but later on, when Marcus looked
back on that time, it seemed like months, or years—nothing happened. He saw Will, he saw Ellie (and
Zoe) at school, Will bought him some new glasses and took him to have his hair cut, he discovered
through Will a couple of singers he liked who weren’t Joni Mitchell or Bob Marley, singers that Ellie
had heard of and didn’t hate. It felt as though he were changing, in his own body and in his head, and
then his mum started the crying thing again.
Just like before, there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. and just like before, it began slowly, with the
odd snuffle after dinner, which one night turned into a long, frightening burst of sobbing, a burst that
Marcus could do nothing about, no matter how many questions he asked or hugs he gave her; and then,
finally, there was the breakfast crying again, and he knew for sure that things were serious and they were
in trouble.
But one thing had changed. Back in the first breakfast crying time, hundreds of years ago, he was on
his own; now, there were loads of people. He had Will, he had Ellie, he had… Anyway, he had two
people, two friends, and that was some kind of improvement on before. He could just go up to either of
them and say, ‘My mum’s at it again,’ and they’d know what he meant, and they’d be able to say
something that might make some kind of sense.
‘My mum’s at it again,’ he said to Will on the second breakfast crying day. (He hadn’t said anything
on day one, just in case it turned out to be merely a temporary depression, but when she started up again
the next morning he could see he’d just been stupidly hopeful.)
‘At what?’
Marcus was disappointed for a moment, but he hadn’t really given Will very much to go on. She could
have been at anything, which was weird if you thought about it: no one could say his mum was
predictable. She could have been moaning about Marcus coming round to Will’s flat again, or she could
have been on about him taking up the piano, or she could have found a boyfriend that Marcus didn’t like
very much (Marcus had told Will about some of the peculiar men she’d been out with since his parents
had split)… It was nice, in a way, contemplating all the things he could have meant when he’d said she
was at it again. He thought it made his mum seem interesting and complicated, which of course she was.
‘The crying.’
‘Oh.’ They were in Will’s kitchen, toasting crumpets under the grill; it was a Thursday afternoon
routine they’d got into. ‘Are you worried about her?’
‘Course. She’s just the same now as she was before. Worse.’ That wasn’t true. Nothing could be worse
than before, because before it had gone on for ages and it had all come to a head on the Dead Duck Day,
but he wanted to make sure that Will knew it was serious.
‘So what are you going to do?’
It hadn’t occurred to Marcus that he would have to do anything—partly because he hadn’t done
anything before (but then, before hadn’t worked out so brilliantly, so maybe he shouldn’t use before as
any kind of example), and partly because he thought Will might take over. That’s what he wanted. That
was the whole point of having friends, he thought. ‘What am
I
going to do? What are
you
going to do?’
‘What am
I
going to do?’ Will laughed, and then remembered that what they were talking about
wasn’t supposed to be funny. ‘Marcus, I can’t do anything.’
‘You could talk to her.’
‘Why should she listen to me? Who am I? Nobody.’
‘You’re not nobody. You’re—’
‘Just because you come round here for a cup of tea after school doesn’t mean I can stop your mum
from… doesn’t mean I can cheer your mum up. In fact, I know I can’t.’
‘I thought we were friends.’
‘Ow. Fuck. Sorry.’ In attempting to remove a crumpet, Will had burnt his fingers. ‘Is that what we are,
d’you reckon? Friends?’ He seemed to find this funny too; at any rate, he was smiling.
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‘Yeah. So what would you say we are?’
‘Well. Friends is fine.’
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘It’s a bit funny, isn’t it? You and me?’
‘I suppose so.’ Marcus thought about it for a little while longer. ‘Why?’
‘Because we’re such different heights.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Joke.’
‘Ha ha.’
Will let Marcus butter the crumpets because he loved doing it. It was much better than buttering toast,
because with toast you had that thing where if the butter was too cold and hard all you could do was
scrape off the brown that made toast what it was, and he hated that. With crumpets it was effortless: you
just put a lump of butter on top, waited for a few seconds, then messed it about until it started to
disappear into the holes. It was one of the few occasions in life where things seemed to go right every
time.
‘D’you want anything on it?’
‘Yeah.’ He reached for the honey, put his knife in the jar and began twirling it about.
‘Listen,’ Will said. ‘That’s right. We’re friends. That’s why I can’t do anything about your mum.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘I said it was a joke that we’re different heights, but maybe it’s not. Maybe that’s how you should look
at it. I’m your mate and I’m about a foot taller than you, and that’s it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Marcus said. ‘I’m not getting you.’
‘I had a mate at school who was about a foot taller than me. He was enormous. He was six foot one
when we were in the second year.’
‘We don’t have second years.’
‘Year whatever it is. Year eight.’
‘So what?’
‘I’d never have asked him to help if my mum was depressed. We used to talk about football and
Mission Impossible
and that was it. Say we were talking about whether, I don’t know, Peter Osgood
should be playing for England, and then I said, "Oi, Phil, will you talk to my mum because she’s in tears
all the time," he’d have looked at me as if I were nuts. He was twelve. What’s he going to say to my
mum? "Hello, Mrs Freeman, have you thought of tranquillizers?" ’
‘I don’t know who Peter Osgood is. I don’t know about football.’
‘Oh, Marcus, stop being so bloody obtuse. What I’m saying is, OK, I’m your friend. I’m not your
uncle, I’m not your dad, I’m not your big brother. I can tell you who Kurt Cobain is and what trainers to
get, and that’s it. Understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
But on the way home Marcus remembered the end of the conversation, the way Will had said
‘Understood?’ in a way that was supposed to tell him that the conversation was over, and he wondered
whether friends did that. He didn’t think they did. He knew teachers who said that, and parents who said
that, but he didn’t know any friends who said that, no matter how tall they were.
Marcus wasn’t surprised about Will, not really. If he had been asked to say who his best friend was,
he’d have gone for Ellie—not just because he loved her and wanted to go out with her, but because she
was nice to him, and always had been, not counting the first time he’d met her, when she’d called him a
squitty little shitty snotty bastard. She hadn’t been all that nice then. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Will
hadn’t ever been nice to him, what with the trainers and the crumpets and the two video games and so
on, but it would be fair to say that sometimes Will didn’t look thrilled to see him, especially if he called
round four or five days in a row. Ellie, on the other hand, always threw her arms around him and made a
fuss of him, and that, Marcus thought, had to mean something.
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Today, however, she didn’t seem terribly pleased to see him. She looked down and distracted, and she
didn’t say anything, let alone do anything, when he went to see her in her classroom at breaktime. Zoe
was sitting next to her, looking at her and holding her hand.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Zoe.
Marcus hated it when people said that to him, because he never had.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Kurt Cobain.’
‘What about him?’
‘He tried to kill himself. Took an overdose.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘We think so. They pumped his stomach.’
‘Good.’
‘Nothing’s good,’ said Ellie.
‘No,’ said Marcus. ‘But—’
‘He’ll do it, you know,’ said Ellie. ‘In the end. They always do. He wants to die. It wasn’t a cry for
help. He hates this world.’
Marcus suddenly felt sick. The moment he’d walked out of Will’s flat the previous evening he’d been
imagining this conversation with Ellie, and how she would cheer him up in a way that Will never could,
and it wasn’t like that at all; instead, the room was beginning to turn round slowly, and all the colour
was draining out of it.
‘How do you know? How do you know he wasn’t just messing about? I’ll bet you he never does
anything like it again.’
‘You don’t know him,’ Ellie said.
‘Neither do you,’ Marcus shouted at her. ‘He’s not even a real person. He’s just a singer. He’s just
someone on a sweatshirt. It’s not like he’s anyone’s mum.’
‘No, he’s someone’s dad, you little prat,’ said Ellie. ‘He’s Frances Bean’s dad. He’s got a beautiful
little girl and he still wants to die. So, you know.’
Marcus did know, he thought. He turned around and ran out.
He decided to skip the next couple of lessons. If he went to the maths class, he would sit and dream
and get picked on and laughed at when he attempted to answer a question that had been asked an hour or
a month before, or that hadn’t been asked at all; he wanted to be on his own to think properly, without
irrelevant interruptions, so he went to the boys’ toilets near the gym and shut himself in the right-hand
cubicle, because it had comforting hot pipes running along the wall which you could sort of squat down
on. After a few minutes someone came in and started kicking on the door.
‘Are you in there, Marcus? I’m sorry. I’d forgotten about your mum. It’s OK. She’s not like Kurt.’
He paused for a moment, then unbolted the door and peered round it.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you’re right. He’s not a real person.’
‘You’re only saying that to make me feel better.’
‘OK, he’s a real person. But he’s a different sort of real person.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know. He just is. He’s like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix and all those
people. You know that he’s going to die, and it’ll be OK.’
‘OK for who? Not for… what’s her name?’
‘Frances Bean?’
‘Yeah. Why is it OK for her? It’s not OK for her. It’s just OK for you.’
A boy from Ellie’s year came in to use the toilet. ‘Go
away
,’ said Ellie, as if she had said it a hundred
times before, and as if the kid had no right to be wanting a pee in the first place. ‘We’re talking.’ He
opened his mouth to argue, realized who he was about to argue with, and went out again. ‘Can I come
in?’ Ellie said when he’d gone.
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‘If there’s room.’
They squashed up next to each other on the hot pipes, and Ellie pulled the door towards her and bolted
it.
‘You think I know things, but I don’t,’ said Ellie. ‘Not really. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I
don’t know why he feels like he does, or why your mum feels like she does. And I don’t know what it
feels like to be you. Pretty scary, I should think.’
‘Yeah.’ He started to cry, then. It wasn’t noisy crying—his eyes just filled with tears and they started
to stream down his cheeks—but it was still embarrassing. He’d never thought he’d cry in front of Ellie.
She put her arm around him. ‘What I mean is, don’t listen to me. You know more than I do. You
should be telling me things about it.’
‘I don’t know what to say about it.’
‘Let’s talk about something else, then.’
But they didn’t talk about anything for a while. They just sat on the pipes together, moving their
bottoms when they got too hot, and waited until they felt like going back out into the world.
Thirty
Will had vertigo, so he didn’t like looking down. But sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Sometimes
someone said something, and he did look down, and he was left with an irresistible urge to jump. He
could remember the last time it had happened: it was when he had split up with Jessica, and she had
phoned him late at night and told him he was useless, worthless, that he would never be or do anything,
that he had had the chance with her to—there was some peculiar, incomprehensible phrase she had
used—
sprinkle some salt on the ice
, that was it, by having a relationship that meant something, and
maybe a family. And while she was saying it he had started to get panicky, clammy, dizzy, because he
knew that some people might think she was right, but he also knew that there was nothing in the world
he could do about it.
He’d had just the same feeling when Marcus was asking him to do something about Fiona. Of course
he should do something about Fiona; all that stuff about being the same but taller was bollocks,
obviously. He was older than Marcus, he knew more… Every way you looked at it there was an
argument that said, get involved, help the kid out, look after him.
He wanted to help him out, and he had done in some ways. But this depression thing, there was no
way he wanted to get involved in that. He could write the whole conversation in his head, he could hear
it like a radio play, and he didn’t like what he heard. There were two words in particular that made him
want to cover his ears with his hands; they always had done, and they always would, as long as his life
revolved around
Countdown
and
Home and Away
and new Marks and Spencer sandwich combinations,
and he could see no way in which he could avoid them in any conversation with Fiona about her
depression. Those two words were ‘the point’. As in, ‘What’s the point?’; ‘I don’t see the point’; ‘there’s
just no point’ (a phrase which omits the ‘the’, but one that counts anyway, because the ‘the’ wasn’t the
point of ‘the point’, really)… You couldn’t have a talk about life, and especially about the possibility of
ending it, without bringing up the fucking point, and Will just couldn’t see one. Sometimes that was
OK; sometimes you could be bombed out of your head on magic mushrooms at two in the morning, and
some arsehole lying on the floor with his head jammed up against the speakers would want to talk about
the point, and you could simply say, ‘There isn’t one, so shut up.’ But you couldn’t say that to someone
who was so unhappy and lost that they wanted to empty a whole bottle of pills down themselves and go
to sleep for as long as it took. Telling someone like Fiona that there was no point was more or less the
same as killing her off, and though Will hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye with her, he could honestly say
he had no desire to murder her.
People like Fiona really pissed him off. They ruined it for everyone. It wasn’t easy, floating on the
surface of everything: it took skill and nerve, and when people told you that they were thinking of taking
their own life, you could feel yourself being dragged under with them. Keeping your head above water
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