Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
was what it was all about, Will reckoned. That was what it was all about for everyone, but those who
had reasons for living, jobs and relationships and pets, their heads were a long way from the surface
anyway. They were wading in the shallow end, and only a bizarre accident, a freak wave from the wave
machine, was going to sink them. But Will was struggling. He was way out of his depth, and he had
cramp, probably because he’d gone in too soon after his lunch, and there were all sorts of ways he could
see himself being dragged up to the surface by some smoothy life-guard with blond hair and a
washboard stomach, long after his lungs had filled with chlorinated water. He needed someone buoyant
to hang on to; he certainly didn’t need a dead weight like Fiona. He was very sorry, but that was the way
things were. And that was the thing about Rachel: she was buoyant. She could keep him afloat. He went
to see Rachel.
His relationship with Rachel was weird, or what Will considered weird, which was, he supposed, very
different from what David Cronenberg or that guy who wrote
The Wasp Factory
considered weird. The
weird thing was that they still hadn’t had sex, even though they’d been seeing each other for a few
weeks. The subject just never came up. He was almost sure that she liked him, as in she seemed to enjoy
seeing him and they never seemed to run out of things to talk about; he was more than sure that he liked
her, as in he enjoyed seeing her, he wanted to be with her all the time for the rest of his life, and he
couldn’t look at her without being conscious of his pupils dilating to an enormous and possibly comical
size. It was fair to say that they liked each other in different ways.
(On top of which he had developed an almost irresistible urge to kiss her when she was saying
something interesting, which he regarded as a healthy sign—he had never before wanted to kiss
someone simply because she was stimulating—but which she was beginning to view with some distrust,
even though she didn’t, as far as he knew, know what was going on. What happened was, she would be
talking with humour and passion and a quirky, animated intelligence about Ali, or music, or her
painting, and he would drift off into some kind of possibly sexual but certainly romantic reverie, and she
would ask him whether he was listening, and he would feel embarrassed and protest too much in a way
that suggested he hadn’t been paying attention because she was boring him stupid. It was something of a
double paradox, really: you were enjoying someone’s conversation so much that a) you appeared to
glaze over, and b) you wanted to stop her talking by covering her mouth with yours. It was no good and
something had to be done about it, but he had no idea what: he had never been in this situation before.)
He didn’t mind having a female friend; his realization during his drink with Fiona that he had never
had any kind of relationship with someone he hadn’t wanted to sleep with still unsettled him. The
problem was that he did want to sleep with Rachel, very much, and he didn’t know whether he could
bear to sit there on her sofa with his eyes dilating wildly for the next ten or twenty years, or however
long female friends lasted (how would he know?), listening to her being unintentionally sexy on the
subject of drawing mice. He didn’t know whether his pupils could bear it, more to the point. Wouldn’t
they start hurting after a while? He was almost sure it wouldn’t do them much good, all that expanding
and contracting, but he would only mention the pupil-pain to Rachel as a last resort; there was a remote
possibility that she might want to sleep with him to save his eyesight, but he’d prefer to find another,
more conventionally romantic route to her bed. Or his bed. He wasn’t bothered about which bed they did
it in. The point was that it just wasn’t happening.
And then it happened, that evening, for no reason that he could fathom at the time—although later,
when he thought about it, he came up with one or two ideas that made sense but the implications of
which he found somewhat disturbing. One moment they were talking, the next moment they were
kissing, and the moment after that she was leading him upstairs with one hand and unbuttoning her
denim shirt with the other. And the weird thing was that sex hadn’t been in the air, as far as he could
tell; he’d simply come round to see a friend because he was feeling low. So here was the first of the
disturbing implications: if he ended up having sex when he had been unable to detect sex in the air, he
was obviously a pretty hopeless sex detective. If, in the immediate aftermath of an apparently sex-free
conversation, a beautiful woman started to lead you to the bedroom while unbuttoning her shirt, you
were clearly missing something somewhere.
It began with a stroke of luck that passed him by at the time: Ali was away for the night, sleeping over
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at a school-friend’s house. If Rachel had told him at any other stage of their relationship that she was
unencumbered by her psychotically Oedipal son, he would have taken it as a sign from Almighty God
that he was about to get laid, but today it didn’t even register. They went into the kitchen, she made
them coffee and he found himself launching into the whole thing about Fiona and Marcus and the point
even before the kettle had boiled.
‘What’s the
point
?’ Rachel echoed. ‘Jesus.’
‘And don’t say Ali. I haven’t got an Ali.’
‘You’ve got a Marcus.’
‘It’s hard to think of Marcus as the point of anything. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true.
You’ve met him.’
‘He’s just a bit messed up. But he adores you.’
It had never occurred to Will that Marcus actually had any real feelings towards him, especially
feelings that were visible to a third party. He knew that Marcus liked hanging out at his place, and he
knew that Marcus described him as a friend, but all this he had taken merely as evidence of the boy’s
eccentricity and loneliness. Rachel’s observation that there were real feelings involved kind of changed
things, just as they sometimes did when you found out that a woman you hadn’t noticed was attracted to
you, so that you ended up reassessing the situation and finding her much more interesting than you ever
had done before.
‘You reckon?’
‘Of course he does.’
‘He’s still not the point, though. If I were about to stick my head in the gas oven, and then you told me
Marcus adored me, I wouldn’t necessarily take it out again.’
Rachel laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I don’t know. Just the idea that I’d be there in that situation. If you ended up sticking your head in a
gas oven at the end of an evening, we’d have to come to the conclusion that the evening hadn’t been a
raging success.’
‘I…’ Will stopped, and started, and then ploughed on anyway, with as much sincerity as he could
muster, and with much more sincerity than the line could bear. ‘I would never stick my head in a gas
oven at the end of an evening with you.’
He knew the moment he’d said it that it was a big mistake. He’d meant it, but that was precisely what
provoked the hilarity: Rachel laughed and laughed until her eyes filled with tears. ‘That,’ she said in
between great gulps of air, ‘is… the… most… romantic… thing… anyone’s ever said to me.’
Will sat there helplessly, feeling like the most stupid man in the world, but when things calmed down
again they seemed to be in a different place, somewhere where they were able to be warmer and less
nervous with each other. Rachel made the coffee, found some stale custard creams and sat down with
him at the kitchen table.
‘You don’t need a point.’
‘Don’t I? That’s not what it feels like.’
‘No. See, I was thinking about you. About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what
you do.’
‘What?’ For a moment Will was completely bewildered. ‘Tough in your head’, ‘Do what you do’…
These were not phrases that anyone used about him too often. What the fuck was it he’d told Rachel he
did? Work in a coalmine? Teach young offenders? But then he remembered he’d never actually told
Rachel any lies, and his bewilderment took a different shape. ‘What do I do?’
‘Nothing.’
That’s what Will thought he did. ‘So how come I have to be tough to do that?’
‘Because… most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or
whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and despair, and you don’t seem
a very desperate person.’
‘Too stupid.’
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‘You’re not stupid. So why don’t you ever put your head in the oven?’
‘I don’t know. There’s always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in
NYPD Blue
to make you want to watch the next episode.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s the point?
NYPD Blue
? Jesus.’ It was worse than he thought.
‘No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the
point. I don’t know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don’t think life’s too bad. You love
things. Telly. Music. Food.’ She looked at him. ‘Women, probably. Which I guess means you like sex
too.’
‘Yeah.’ He said it sort of grumpily, as if she had caught him out somehow, and she smiled.
‘I don’t mind. People who like sex are usually pretty good at it. Anyway. I’m the same. I mean, I love
things, and they’re mostly different things from you. Poetry. Paintings. My work. Men, and sex. My
friends. Ali. I want to see what Ali gets up to tomorrow.’ She started fiddling with the biscuit, breaking
off the ends in an attempt to expose the cream, but the biscuit was too soft and it crumbled.
‘See, a few years ago, I was really, really down, and I did think about… you know, what you imagine
Fiona’s thinking about. And I really felt guilty about it, because of Ali, and I knew I shouldn’t be that
way but I was, and… Anyway, it was always, you know, not today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.
And after a few weeks of that I knew I was never going to do it, and the reason I was never going to do
it was because I didn’t want to miss out. I don’t mean that life was great and I didn’t want not to
participate. I just mean there were always one or two things that seemed unfinished, things I wanted to
follow through. Like you want to see the next episode of
NYPD Blue
. If I’d just finished stuff for a book,
I wanted to see it come out. If I was seeing a guy, I wanted one more date. If Ali had a parents’ evening
coming up, I wanted to talk to his form teacher. Little things like that, but there was always something.
And in the end I realized there would always be something, and that those somethings would be
enough.’ She looked up from the remnants of her biscuit and laughed, embarrassed. ‘That’s what I think,
anyway.’
‘Fiona must have things like that.’
‘Yeah, well. I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like Fiona’s getting the breaks. You need them too.’
Was that really all there was to it? Probably not, Will thought, on balance. There were probably all
sorts of things missing—stuff about how depression made you tired of everything, tired of everything no
matter how much you loved it; and stuff about loneliness, and panic, and plain bewilderment. But
Rachel’s simple positivity was something to be going on with and, in any case, the conversation about
the point created a point of its own, because there was this pause, and Rachel looked at him, and that
was when they started kissing.
‘Why don’t I talk to her?’ said Rachel. They were the first words spoken afterwards, although there
had been a bit of talking during, and for a moment Will didn’t understand what she meant at all: he was
trying to trace it back to something that had taken place in the previous thirty minutes, a half-hour that
had left him feeling a bit shaky and almost tearful, and had led him to question his previous conviction
that sex was some sort of fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs and a great night out, but nothing
much more than that.
‘You? She doesn’t know you.’
‘I don’t see why that would matter. Might even help. And maybe you’d get the hang of it, if I showed
you how. It’s not so bad.’
‘OK.’ There was something in Rachel’s voice that Will couldn’t quite isolate, but he didn’t want to
think about Fiona just at that moment, so he didn’t try very hard. He couldn’t ever remember feeling so
happy.
Thirty-One
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Marcus was finding it hard to get used to the idea that winter was over. Pretty much everything
Marcus had experienced in London had taken place in the dark and the wet (there must have been a few
light evenings right at the beginning of the school year, but so much had happened since that he no
longer had any recollection of them), and now he was able to walk home from Will’s place in the late
afternoon sunshine. It was hard not to feel that everything was OK the first week after the clocks had
gone forward; it was ridiculously easy to believe that his mum would get better, that he’d suddenly age
three years and suddenly get cool so that Ellie would like him, that he’d score the winning goal for the
school football team and become the most popular person in school.
But that was stupid, in the same way that star signs were stupid, in his opinion. The clocks had gone
forward for everybody, not just him, and there was no way that every depressed mother was going to
cheer up, there was no way that every kid in Britain was going to score the winning goal for the school
football team—especially every kid in Britain who hated football and didn’t know which end of a ball to
kick—and there was certainly no way that every single twelve-year-old was going to become fifteen
overnight. The chances of it happening to even one of them were pretty slim, and even if it did, it
wouldn’t be Marcus, knowing his luck. It would be some other twelve-year-old at some other school
who wasn’t in love with someone three years older than him, and who therefore wouldn’t even care very
much. The injustice of the scene that Marcus had just pictured made him angry, and he marked his
return home by slamming the door in a temper.
‘Have you been round to Will’s?’ his mum asked. She looked OK. Maybe one of the clocks-forward
wishes had come true.
‘Yeah. I wanted to…’ He still felt he should come up with reasons for why he went round, and he still
couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘I don’t care. Your dad’s hurt himself. You’ve got to go up and see him. He fell off a window-ledge.’
‘I’m not going while you’re like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like crying all the time.’
‘I’m OK. Well, I’m not OK, but I’m not going to do anything. Promise.’
‘Is he really bad?’
‘He’s broken his collar bone. And he’s a bit concussed.’
He fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.
‘What was he doing on a window-ledge?’
‘Some sort of DIY thing. Painting, or grouting, or one of those Scrabble words. For the first time ever.
That’ll teach him a lesson.’
‘And why do I have to go up?’
‘He was asking for you. I think he’s a bit doolally at the moment.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Oh, Marcus, I’m sorry, that isn’t why he’s been asking for you. I just meant… I think he’s feeling a
bit pathetic. Lindsey said he was quite lucky it wasn’t worse, so maybe he’s having this big think about
his life.’
‘He can piss off.’
‘Marcus!’
But Marcus didn’t want an argument about where and why he had learnt to swear; he wanted to sit in
his room and sulk, and that’s exactly what he did.
He’s having this big think about his life
… That had made Marcus so angry, when his mum had told
him, and now he was trying to work out why. He was quite good at working things out when he wanted
to: he had an old bean bag in his room, and he sat on it and stared at the wall where he had stuck up
some interesting stories out of the newspaper. ‘MAN FALLS FIVE THOUSAND FEET AND LIVES’;
‘DINOSAURS MAY HAVE BEEN WIPED OUT BY METEOR.’ Those were the sorts of things that
made you have a big think about your life, not falling off a window-ledge while you were pretending to
be a proper dad. Why had he never had a big think before, when he wasn’t falling off a window-ledge?
Over the last year or so it seemed like everyone had been having big thinks, apart from his father. His
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mum, for example, never did anything else other than have big thinks, which was probably why
everyone had to worry about her all the time. And why did he only want to see his son when he’d
broken his collar bone? Marcus couldn’t remember ever having come home before and his mum telling
him to get on the train to Cambridge because his dad was desperate. All those hundreds and hundreds of
days when his collar bone was all right, Marcus had heard nothing.
He went downstairs to see his mother.
‘I’m not going,’ he said to her. ‘He makes me sick.’
It wasn’t until the next day, when he was talking to Ellie about the window-ledge, that he began to
change his mind about going to see his dad. They were in an empty classroom during the morning break,
although it hadn’t been empty at first: when Marcus had told her he wanted a chat, she’d taken his hand,
led him inside, and scared off the half-dozen kids messing about in there, kids she didn’t know but who
seemed perfectly prepared to believe that Ellie would follow through with the terrible threats she was
making. (Why did that happen? he wondered. She wasn’t much taller than him, so how did she get away
with this stuff? Maybe if he started to wear that sort of eye make-up and cut his own hair he’d be able to
make people scared of him, too, but there would still be something missing.)
‘You should go and see him. Tell him what you think of him. I would. Jerk. I’ll come with you, if you
like. Give him what for.’ She laughed, and though Marcus heard her he had already drifted off by then.
He was thinking about how nice it would be to have a whole hour on a train with Ellie, just the two of
them; and then he was thinking how great it would be if he let Ellie loose on his dad. Ellie was like a
guided missile in school, and sometimes it felt as though she were his personal guided missile.
Whenever he was with her he could point her at targets and she destroyed them, and he loved her for it.
She had beaten up Lee Hartley’s mate, and she stopped people laughing at him quite so much… And if
it worked so well in school, why wouldn’t it work away from school? There was no reason he could
think of. He was going to point Ellie at his dad and see what happened.
‘Will you come with me really, Ellie?’
‘Yeah, of course. If you want me to. It’d be a laugh.’ Marcus knew she would say yes, if he asked her.
Ellie would say yes to just about anything, apart from a dance at a party. ‘Anyway, you don’t want to go
up there on your own, do you?’
He always did things on his own, so he had never bothered even thinking about whether there was a
choice. That was the trouble with Ellie: he was frightened that when and if he didn’t see her any more,
he’d still be aware that there were choices, but it wouldn’t do him any good because he wouldn’t be able
to get at them, and his whole life would be ruined.
‘Not really. Would Zoe come?’
‘No. She wouldn’t know what to say to him, and I will. Just us.’
‘OK then. Brilliant.’ Marcus didn’t want to think about what Ellie might have to say. He’d worry
about that later.
‘Have you got any money? ‘Cos I haven’t got the train fare.’
‘I can get it.’ He didn’t spend very much; he reckoned he had at least twenty pounds saved up, and his
mum would give him what he needed for the trip anyway.
‘So shall we go next week, then?’ It was nearly Easter, and they were on holiday next week, so they
could stay overnight if they wanted. And Marcus would have to ring Ellie at home to make
arrangements—it would be like a proper date.
‘Yeah. Cool. We’ll have a great time.’
Marcus wondered for a moment whether his idea of a great time would be the same as Ellie’s idea of a
great time, and then he decided not to worry about that until later.
Fiona wanted to come to King’s Cross with Marcus, but he managed to talk her out of it.
‘It’d be too sad,’ he told her.
‘You’re only going for a night.’
‘But I’ll miss you.’
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