Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
‘You’ll still be missing me if we say goodbye at the underground station. In fact, you’ll have to miss
me for longer.’
‘It’ll seem more normal to say goodbye at the underground, though.’
He knew he was overdoing it, and he knew what he was saying didn’t make much sense anyway, but
he wasn’t going to risk a meeting between Ellie and his mum at the station. She’d stop him from going if
she knew he was taking Ellie along to Cambridge to blow up his dad.
The two of them walked from the flat to Holloway Road station, and said goodbye in the tube
entrance.
‘You’ll be OK,’ she said to him.
‘Yeah.’
‘And it’ll be over before you know it.’
‘It’s only for a night,’ he said. By the time they reached the underground he’d forgotten he’d told her
how much he would miss her. ‘It’s only for a night, but it seems like forever.’ He was hoping his mum
wouldn’t remember this when he came back. If she did, he probably wouldn’t be allowed down to the
shops on his own.
‘I shouldn’t be making you go. You’ve had such a rough time lately.’
‘I’ll be fine. Really.’
Because he was going to miss her so much, she gave him an enormous hug that went on forever, while
everyone walking past watched.
The tube wasn’t crowded. It was mid-afternoon—his dad had worked out the train times so that
Lindsey could pick him up from Cambridge on her way home from work—and there was only one other
person in his carriage, an old guy reading the evening paper. He was looking at the back page, so
Marcus could see some of the stuff on the front; the first thing he noticed was the photo. It seemed so
familiar that for a moment he thought it was a picture of someone he knew, a member of the family, and
maybe they had it at home, in a frame on the piano, or pinned on to the cork board in the kitchen. But
there was no family friend or relative who had bleached hair and half a beard and looked like a sort of
modern Jesus…
He knew who it was now. He saw the same picture every single day of the week on Ellie’s chest. He
felt hot all over; he didn’t even need to read the old guy’s paper, but he did anyway. ‘ROCK STAR
COBAIN DEAD’, was the headline, and underneath, in smaller writing ‘Nirvana singer, 27, shoots
himself’. Marcus thought and felt a lot of things all at once: he wondered whether Ellie had seen the
paper yet, and if she hadn’t then how she’d be when she found out; and he wondered if his mum was
OK, even though he knew there was no connection between his mum and Kurt Cobain because his mum
was a real person and Kurt Cobain wasn’t; and then he felt confused, because the newspaper headline
had turned Kurt Cobain into a real person somehow; and then he just felt very sad—sad for Ellie, sad for
Kurt Cobain’s wife and little girl, sad for his mum, sad for himself. And then he was at King’s Cross and
he had to get off the train.
He found Ellie underneath the departure board, which was where they had arranged to meet. She
seemed normal. ‘Platform ten b,’ she said. ‘It’s in another part of the station, I think.’
Everyone was carrying an evening paper, so Kurt Cobain was everywhere. And because the photo in
the paper was exactly the same picture that Ellie had on her sweatshirt, it took Marcus a while to get
used to the idea that all these people were holding something that he had always thought of as a part of
her. Every time he saw it he wanted to nudge her and point at it, but he said nothing. He didn’t know
what to do.
‘Right. Follow me,’ Ellie shouted in a pretend-bossy voice that would have made Marcus giggle at any
other time. Today, however, he could only manage a weak little smile; he was too worried to respond to
her in the way he usually did, and he could only listen to what she was saying, not the way she was
saying it. He didn’t want to follow her, because if she was out in front she was bound to notice the army
of Kurt Cobains marching towards her.
‘Why should I follow you? Why don’t you follow me for a change?’
‘Ooh, Marcus. You’re so masterful,’ said Ellie. ‘I love that in a man.’
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‘Where are we going?’
Ellie laughed. ‘Ten b. Over there.’
‘Right.’ He stood directly in front of her and began to walk very slowly towards the platform.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Leading you.’
She pushed him in the back. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Get a move on.’
He suddenly remembered something that he’d seen in one of the Open University programmes his
mum used to have to watch for her course. He’d watched it with her because it was funny: there were all
these people in a room, and half of them were wearing blindfolds, and the other half had to lead the
blindfolded half around and not let them bump into each other. It was something to do with trust, his
mum had said. If someone could guide you around safely when you were feeling vulnerable, then you
learnt to trust them, and that was important. The best bit of the programme was when this woman
walked an old man straight into a door and he smashed his head, and they started having a row.
‘Ellie, do you trust me?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Do you trust me, yes or no?’
‘Yes. As far as I can throw you.’
‘Ha, ha.’
‘Of course I trust you.’
‘OK, then. Close your eyes and hang on to my jacket.’
‘Eh?’
‘Close your eyes and hang on to my jacket. You’re not allowed to peek.’
A young guy with long, straggly bleached hair looked at Ellie, at her sweatshirt and then her face. For
a moment it looked as though he was going to say something to her, and Marcus began to panic; he
stood in between her and the guy and grabbed her.
‘Come on.’
‘Marcus, have you gone mad?’
‘I’m going to guide you through all these people and I’m going to get you on the train, and then you’ll
trust me forever.’
‘If I trust you forever, it won’t be because I spent five minutes wandering around King’s Cross station
with my eyes closed.’
‘No. OK. But it’ll help.’
‘Oh, fucking hell. Come on, then.’
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘Eyes closed, no peeking?’
‘Marcus!’
They set off. To get to the Cambridge train you had to go out of the main part of the station and into
another, smaller part tucked away at the side; most people were walking in their direction to get the train
home from work, but there were enough people coming at them holding newspapers to make the game
worthwhile.
‘Are you OK?’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Yes. You’ll tell me if we have to go upstairs or anything?’
‘Course.’
Marcus was almost enjoying it all now. They were going through a narrow passageway, and you had
to concentrate, because you couldn’t just stop dead or sidestep, and you had to remember that you’d sort
of doubled in size, so you had to think about what sort of spaces you could fit into. This must be what it
was like if you started driving a coach when you were used to a Fiat Uno or something. The best thing
about it was that he really did have to look after Ellie, and he liked the feeling that brought with it. He’d
never looked after anything or anybody in his whole life—he’d never had a pet, because he wasn’t
bothered about animals, even though he and his mum had agreed not to eat them (why hadn’t he just
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told her he wasn’t bothered about animals, instead of getting into an argument about factory farming and
so on?)—and as he loved Ellie more than he would ever have loved a goldfish or a hamster, it felt real.
‘Are we nearly there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The light’s different.’
‘We’re out of the big station and now we’re going into the little one. The train’s there waiting for us.’
‘I know why you’re doing this, Marcus,’ she suddenly said in a small, quiet voice that didn’t sound
like her. He stopped, but she didn’t let go of him. ‘You think I haven’t seen the paper, but I have.’
He turned round to look at her, but she wouldn’t open her eyes.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah. Well. Not really.’ She rummaged around in her bag and produced a bottle of vodka. ‘I’m going
to get drunk.’
Suddenly Marcus could see a problem with his guided missile plan: the problem was that Ellie wasn’t
actually a guided missile. You couldn’t guide her. That didn’t matter so much in school, because school
was full of walls and rules and she could just bounce off them; but out in the world, where there were no
walls and rules, she was scary. She could just blow up in his face any time.
Thirty-Two
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea—it wasn’t even particularly risky. On the contrary,
it was just a mundane social arrangement, the sort that people make all the time, all over the place. If
these people were ever to realize the possible consequences, Will reflected later, all the tears and
embarrassment and panic that could ensue in the event of these arrangements going just slightly wrong,
they would never arrange to meet for a drink again.
The plan was for Rachel, Will and Fiona to go to a pub in Islington while Marcus was up in
Cambridge visiting his father. They would have a drink and a chat, then Will would absent himself and
Rachel and Fiona would have a drink and a chat, as a result of which Fiona would cheer up, feel better
about things and lose the urge to top herself. What could possibly go wrong?
Will arrived at the pub first, got himself a drink, sat down, lit a cigarette. Fiona arrived shortly
afterwards; she was distracted and slightly manic. She asked for a large gin and ice, no mixer, and
sipped at it nervously and quickly. Will started to feel a little uncomfortable.
‘Have you heard from the boy?’
‘Which boy?’
‘Marcus?’
‘Oh, him!’ She laughed. ‘I’d forgotten all about him. No. He’ll leave a message while I’m out, I
should think. Who’s your friend?’
Will looked round, just to check that the seat beside him was as empty as he remembered it to be, and
then back at Fiona. Maybe she was imagining people; maybe that’s why she got down and cried a lot.
Maybe the people she imagined were horrible, or as depressed as she was.
‘Which friend?’
‘Rachel?’
‘Who’s my friend Rachel?’ Now he didn’t understand the question. If she knew his friend Rachel was
Rachel, what exactly was the information she required?
‘Who is she? Where does she come from? How does she fit in? Why do you want me to meet her?’
‘Oh. I see. I just thought, you know.’
‘No.’
‘I just thought you might find her interesting.’
‘Will this happen every time you meet somebody? I have to see them for a drink, even though I don’t
really know you, let alone them?’
‘Oh, no. Not every time, anyway. I’ll weed out the rubbish.’
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‘Thank you.’
And still no Rachel. She was now fifteen minutes late. After a peculiar and pointless conversation
about John Major’s shirts (Fiona’s choice of conversational topic, not his), and several lengthy silences,
Rachel was thirty minutes late.
‘She does exist?’
‘Oh, she definitely exists.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll go and phone her.’ He went to the payphone, got the answerphone, waited for a human
interruption that never came, and went back to his seat without leaving a message. The only excuse he
would accept, he decided, would involve Ali and a large articulated vehicle… Unless she had never
intended to come. He suddenly realized with terrible clarity that he’d been set up, that when Rachel had
said that he would get the hang of it if she showed him how, this is what she had meant. He wanted to
hate her, but he couldn’t: instead he felt a rising panic.
Another silence, and then Fiona started crying. Her eyes filled up and started to leak down her face
and on to her pullover, and she just sat there quietly, like a kid oblivious to a runny nose. For a while
Will thought he could just ignore it, and it would go away, but he knew deep down that ignoring her was
simply not an option, not if he were worth anything at all.
‘What’s the matter?’ He tried to say it as if he knew it were a big question, but it came out all wrong:
the gravity sounded, to him at least, like tetchiness, as if there were a ‘now’ missing from the end.
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s not true, is it?’ It still wouldn’t be too late. If Rachel arrived breathless and apologetic at this
second, he could stand up, make the introductions, tell Rachel that Fiona was just about to explain the
root cause of her misery, and then shove off. He looked towards the door hopefully and, as if by magic,
it opened: two guys in Man United away shirts walked in.
‘It is true. Nothing’s the matter. No thing. I’m just like this.’
‘Existential despair, right?’
‘Yeah. Right.’
Again, he hadn’t got the tone of it. He’d used the phrase to prove that he knew it (he wondered
whether Fiona thought he was dim), but quickly realized that if you knew it, these were precisely the
circumstances in which you would give it an enormous body-swerve; it sounded flip and pseud and
shallow. He wasn’t cut out for chats about existential despair. It just wasn’t
him
. And what was wrong
with that? There was no shame in it, surely? Leather trousers weren’t him. (He’d tried some on once,
just for a laugh, in a shop called LeatherTime in Covent Garden, and he’d looked like a… Anyway). The
colour green wasn’t him. Antique furniture wasn’t him. And depressive hippy-liberal women weren’t
him. Big deal. It didn’t make him a bad person.
‘I don’t know if there’s a lot of point in talking about this with you,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, more cheerfully than was appropriate. ‘I know what you mean. Shall we finish this and
go, then? I don’t think Rachel’s going to show up.’
Fiona smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘You could try persuading me that I’m wrong.’
‘Could I?’
‘I think I probably need to talk to somebody, and you’re the only one here.’
‘I’m the only one here that you know. But I’d be useless. You could throw that slice of lemon across
the pub and hit somebody who was better than me. As long as you aimed away from that guy who’s
singing on his own over there.’
She laughed. Maybe his lemon joke had done the trick. Maybe she’d look back on those few seconds
as a turning point in her life. But then she shook her head, and said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and began to cry again,
and he could see that he had overrated the power of the throwaway one-liner.
‘Do you want to go and get something to eat?’ he said wearily. He was going to have to look a long
way down now.
They went to Pizza Express on Upper Street. He hadn’t been there since the last time he had had lunch
with Jessica, the ex-girlfriend who was determined to make him as unhappy and sleepless and out of
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touch and burdened by parenthood as she had become. That was a long, long time ago, before SPAT and
Marcus and Suzie and Fiona and Rachel and everything. He’d been an idiot then, but at least he’d been
an idiot with an idea, some kind of belief system; now he was hundreds of years older, one or two IQ
points wiser, and absolutely all over the place. He’d rather be an idiot again. He’d had his whole life set
up so that nobody’s problem was his problem, and now everybody’s problem was his problem, and he
had no solutions for any of them. So how, precisely, was he, or anybody else he was involved with,
better off?
They looked at the menu in silence.
‘I’m not really hungry,’ said Fiona.
‘Please eat,’ said Will, too quickly and too desperately, and Fiona smiled.
‘You think a pizza will help?’ she said.
‘Yes. Veneziana. ‘Cos then you’ll stop Venice sinking into the sea and you’ll feel better.’
‘OK. If I can have extra mushrooms on it.’
‘Good call.’
The waitress came to take their order; Will asked for a beer, a bottle of house red, and a Four Seasons
with extra everything he could think of, including pine nuts. If he was lucky, he would be able to induce
a heart attack, or find that he was suddenly fatally allergic to something.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fiona.
‘What for?’
‘Being like this. And being like this with you.’
‘I’m used to women being like this with me. This is how I spend most evenings.’ Fiona smiled
politely, but suddenly Will felt sick of himself. He wanted to find a way in to the conversation that they
had to have, but there didn’t seem to be one, and there never would be while he was stuck with his brain
and his vocabulary and his personality. He kept feeling as though he were on the verge of saying
something proper and serious and useful; but then he ended up thinking, Oh, fuck it, say something
stupid instead.
‘I’m the one who should apologize,’ he said. ‘I want to help, but I know I won’t be able to. I haven’t
got the answers to anything.’
‘That’s what men think, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘That unless you’ve got some answer, unless you can say, "Oh, I know this bloke in Essex Road who
can fix that for you", then it’s not worth bothering.’
Will shifted in his seat and didn’t say anything. That was precisely what he thought; in fact, he had
spent half the evening trying to think of the name of the bloke in Essex Road, metaphorically speaking.
‘That’s not what I want. I know there’s nothing you can do. I’m depressed. It’s an illness. It just
started. Well, that’s not true, there were things happening that helped it along, but…’
And they were away. It was easier than he could possibly have anticipated: all he had to do was listen
and nod and ask pertinent questions. He had done it before, loads of times, with Angie and Suzie and
Rachel, but that was for a reason. There was no ulterior motive here. He didn’t want to sleep with Fiona,
but he did want her to feel better, and he hadn’t realized that in order to make her feel better he had to
act in exactly the same way as if he did want to sleep with her. He didn’t want to think about what that
meant.
He learnt a lot of things about Fiona. He learnt that she hadn’t really wanted to be a mother, and that
sometimes she hated Marcus with a passion that worried her; he learnt that she worried about her
inability to hold down a relationship (Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an
inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only
cool people screwed up); he learnt that her last birthday had scared her to bits, because she hadn’t been
anywhere, done anything, all the usual malarkey. None of it amounted to anything enormous, but the
sum of her depression was much greater than its parts, and now she had to live with something that tired
her and made her see everything through a greeny-brown gauze. And he learnt that if someone were to
ask her where this thing lived (Will found it hard to imagine a more unlikely question, but that was just
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